Waves of West Valley Teen-Agers Riding Buses to Beach

Amy Gross, 14, says spending the day at the beach is a whole lot better than sitting at home in Oak Park, where there are only so many things a teen-ager can do during the summer.

“Stay home, watch TV, get fat,” she said, after boarding a public bus for the return ride home to the Ventura County town from Malibu Beach. “It’s so much better having a beach bus.”

The Agoura Hills “beach bus,” funded by the city, takes Amy and her friends, who can’t yet drive, to Malibu Beach for a day of surfing or sunning.

Demand seems to be growing for bus transportation from the West San Fernando Valley to the beach, despite a reported ridership lull several years ago. In response, several West Valley public and private beach bus lines have emerged that cater mostly to teen-agers but are available to all.

The same type of services have not surfaced in the East Valley, and community observers say they are not certain why, although they speculated that the area’s distance from the beach causes less demand for beach transportation.

Public bus transportation to the beach in the West Valley is provided by the city of Agoura Hills, the city of Westlake Village and Los Angeles County. The county service is partly subsidized by fares and partly by transportation-earmarked funds that counties receive from the state sales tax.

Ridership totals from the 5-year-old Los Angeles County service, which departs from Calabasas, were unavailable. Agoura Hills issued summer passes to about 600 teen-agers last summer, and more than 200 have been issued so far this year, with the service having begun only last Monday. Westlake Village’s service began in 1986, and 2,351 one-way tickets were issued that year. That number jumped to 3,353 last year, and riders were buying tickets at a faster pace than that in the first week of this summer’s service.

“The ridership is just increasing because of increased awareness that the services are available,” said Gretchen Maglich, assistant to the city manager of Westlake Village.

The apparent demand is welcome news to a private Calabasas company preparing to launch its own bus service to the beach. The service, to begin Tuesday in Northridge and Simi Valley, would be geared toward teen-agers, with buses equipped with retractable tops, stereo systems and music videos.

In contrast to what appears to be a plethora of services in the West Valley, taking a bus to the beach from the East Valley proves to be more difficult. The best way would be to ride a Rapid Transit District bus through the Sepulveda Pass and transfer to another line, such as Wilshire Boulevard, RTD officials say.

“I can’t recall in my several years here of having a request for that kind of regular service from this part of the Valley,” said David Mays, chief deputy to Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi.

“Either it’s because it hasn’t been available and no one is thinking about it, or there is some other type of recreational activity or transportation that’s available,” Mays said.

Youth and community groups, such as one at the Van Nuys-Pierce Park Apartments, have obtained city-funded bus transportation to the beach with the help of Bernardi’s office.

High Response

Although those organized trips have been limited to three to four a summer, the turnouts have been as high as 150 children and teen-agers, demonstrating a demand for beach transportation, said Ana Alvarez, program director at the apartments.

Arthur Broadous, executive director of the Pacoima Community Youth Culture Center, said if area children were “to be able to have a better access to the beach, I believe a lot of them would go more often . . . . Kids in the East Valley are interested in everything, just like anybody else is.”

Ironically, the Agoura Hills and Westlake Village lines were begun after lines in Woodland Hills and Thousand Oaks died for lack of ridership.

“The next year, nobody came forward and asked for a repeat of it,” Thousand Oaks City Councilman Alex Fiore said of that city’s beach bus, which lasted only one summer several years ago. “The kids out here probably liked a little more freedom to go when they want to go and come back when they want to come back.”

Ridership numbers also were low five years ago when the Los Angeles Department of Parks and Recreation discontinued a bus service from Woodland Hills to the beach, said Olga Singer, recreation supervisor for the West Valley. But that wasn’t the only problem.

Behavior Problems

“Any kind of behavior, you name it, we had it with the teen-agers,” Singer said. “Smoking, walking up and down. They were fighting, they were swearing, sticking their heads out the windows, harassing the driver. . . . It’s just as well that the demand died down.”

A County Department of Public Works spokeswoman said no such problems have arisen on the county-run bus from Calabasas.

The Agoura Hills bus service uses picture identification cards as boarding passes, which can be revoked if a rider gets out of line, said Audrey Brown, the city’s recreation supervisor.

Good behavior on the Westlake Village bus is encouraged by parents’ knowledge that their children are riding the bus, Maglich said. The bus tickets are sold at City Hall to people ages 18 and over, so often it is parents who buy tickets for teen-age riders, she said.

Lou Cutrone, who plans to begin running the customized bus from Northridge and Simi Valley to the beach, said the bus lines will have a “conductor,” or chaperon, in addition to a driver.

Cutrone, of Calabasas-based Youthways Transportation, said his buses will stop in Northridge, Encino and Woodland Hills. The bus from Simi Valley will stop in that city, in Thousand Oaks and Agoura Hills. The round-trip fare will be $5, compared to $1.50 for Agoura Hills, $1 for Westlake Village and $1 for the Los Angeles County bus from Calabasas.